The second volume in Giardinos poignant graphic narrative of growing up under Communist rule in postwar Prague lives up to the clean elegance of its first (rev. 5/1/97). Giardino's beautiful background art of Prague architecture contrasts with the sad tale in the foreground: a young man's tortured adolescence made worse by having his father imprisoned as an enemy of the state. The rush of events, both personal and political, flash by in near-wordless frames: Jonas, kicked out of school, gets a job in construction; Stalin dies; Jonas finds better work in a bookstore; the Czech ministry renews its campaign against counter-revolutionaries. The humanity of everyday Czechs is apparent in the sympathetic faces drawn with perfection by Giardino, from the beery plumber, Slavek, to the kindly bookstore owner, Pinkel. Jonas's self-pity reveals itself when he falls for a pretty girl, herself part of a group of young people who read forbidden books for sheer ``mental survival.'' Visually compelling and historically resonant, Giardino's full- color narrative is evolving into a masterwork of its kind.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-56163-197-3
Page Count: 48
Publisher: NBM
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A witty, insightful clash of cultural perspectives, but some extended professorial digressions tend to render the poetic...
Spirited first fiction—a novel in verse, no less—blends social commentary with a tricky love story across the ages involving the 14th-century Persian sensualist poet Hafez and a teenaged New York beauty.
The verse might be free, but in New York as we know it the path to liberation in love is fraught with peril. Iranian-American Columbia professor Pirooz, lonely and despairing, goes to the Sonora Desert to kill himself. Fate brings him to the shadow of two saguaro cacti, which happen to be the reincarnations of two legendary Persian poets. Rumi and Hafez talk Pirooz out of his funk, and he returns to New York, but the encounter kindles in Hafez a yearning for life as he knew it before he became a plant, so he transforms into a curly-haired young cabbie and reintroduces himself to Pirooz by giving him a ride. The professor is overjoyed to have such a boon companion, but Hafez also remains true to his former nature by falling hard for precocious Miraz, only 14 but in her last year of high school. Despite the admonitions of Pirooz, who warns him about American laws such as the ones against sex with minors, and the appearance of cooler-headed Rumi, who seems able to change his appearance at will, Hafez and Miraz delay their bliss only long enough for her to turn 15, then run away together to Montauk, where they cavort naked in the ocean until Hafez is arrested and charged with statutory rape. The trial, which proceeds in spite of Miraz’s pregnancy and protests, is a rumination on love and the law; in a flight of fancy Hafez is freed, returning to Manhattan with his beloved intending to live happily ever after only to encounter tragedy in the city’s mean streets. Can Love survive?
A witty, insightful clash of cultural perspectives, but some extended professorial digressions tend to render the poetic pedantic.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-57962-082-5
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
As crass as they come.
This Middle Eastern stew of a first novel suffers from an identity crisis. Does it want to be a blood-and-guts tale about factional strife and kidnapping in Lebanon, or a more cerebral examination of arms deals and statecraft in the Persian Gulf?
The Lebanon part is straightforward. In 1973, a Maronite militia overlord is gunned down, along with his family and birthday party guests, by a revenge-seeking rival. Eighteen years later, the dead man’s brother, at the Beirut airport, kidnaps a man he wrongly believes to have been implicated in the massacre. Though the ransom demand is made early on, the swap happens only at novel’s end: goodbye, suspense. The kidnapee, Gaspar Bruyn, is the protégé of Bobo (Bertrand de Bossier), the French aristocrat who dominates the story. Bobo, France’s top spy in Lebanon masterminded the massacre to protect his relationship with the PLO; soon after, he became head of France’s intelligence outfit. He’s some guy, this Bobo. Among his achievements: he allowed the Ayatollah to return to Teheran, helped arrange the takeover of the US embassy, and “maneuvered” Saddam Hussein into attacking Iran. (Top that, George Smiley.) All this was done for the glory of France, though not for that dirty Red, Mitterand, or his Jewish advisers. When Mitterand fired him, Bobo became an arms dealer, supplying his top client Saddam (legally) and Saddam’s Iranian adversary (illegally). Playing both sides of the fence eventually caught up with him when, in 1988, he was “executed” by his mistress, Deadeye, on behalf of French intelligence. Scholder moves back and forth between the 1991 kidnapping and earlier time-frames and, inter alia, expatiates on France’s relations with the Arabs, the origins of Iran/Contra, and the Maronites’ ties to Israel’s Sharon; all this makes for a bumpy ride, worsened by clunky prose (“blood was the dominant substance on the lawn, red the prevailing color”).
As crass as they come.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-57962-085-X
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
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